Oversoul
The Tentacled One
It’s been well over a month since the release of Commander Legends. Since the set was spoiled, I’ve been mulling over my gripes regarding a somewhat controversial card in the set, Jeweled Lotus. Wizards of the Coast clearly viewed the upcoming artifact as something that should be exciting, and I wasn’t the only one to find the design both lazy and bad for gameplay. Online, wherever Magic spoilers were being discussed, Jeweled Lotus quickly became a focal point for debates. Such debates have mostly died down and run their course. I avoided direct involvement, but did follow some of those discussions with interest. And that peaked with Gavin Verhey’s claim on Twitter.
My first issue: Dark Ritual appears to be underplayed and undervalued in EDH by a lot of people, and I’ve noticed a trend of competent, experienced players dispensing poor deckbuilding advice because they have misread the effect of tempo advantage in multiplayer games.
I suppose that my enthusiasm for Dark Ritual as a Magic card is no secret. It’s my favorite card of all time. I’ve written about it before. I’ve evaluated the card in a “Magic Memories” thread here at the CPA. When contemplating the article you’re reading now, one of my initial ideas was to just throw the stuff about Dark Ritual into that “Magic Memories” thread and try to forget about the other issues. So I’m biased on the topic of this one card, but after careful self-reflection and consideration of what I’ve been observing in online discourse, I really think that I’m right about this.
Let’s be clear about this: underestimating tempo advantage isn’t universal and isn’t limited to Dark Ritual. Observation of decklists from a variety of sources easily shows that a large portion of decklists online do take advantage of Dark Ritual and similar cards. According to data collected by EDHrec, Dark Ritual is the eighth most popular black card in the format. Magic has grown considerably in recent years, EDH is a popular format among newcomers. This is anecdotal, but my experience in the West Coast Commander League left me dumbfounded at how many people I played with who had gotten into Magic within the past couple of years, but who had well-tuned decks with lots of powerful cards. But other than Masters 25, Dark Ritual hadn’t been printed in sets these newer players would have actually seen. So Dark Ritual is doing just fine in EDH, and its numbers might be depressed a bit due to low adoption rates among those newer players.
Despite my passion for the card, I don’t run Dark Ritual in every deck that has a black color identity. Particularly in three-color decks and more polychromatic decks, sometimes there just isn’t enough of a payoff for Dark Ritual to be worth it. I’ve elected not to run Dark Ritual in some two-color decks, although that’s infrequent. In my own EDH decks, Dark Ritual has probably been my fourth most-played black card behind Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, and Toxic Deluge. What makes this so strange and frustrating is that dismissals of Dark Ritual as bad in the format or as a super-niche card seem to be coming from otherwise knowledgeable sources, rather than from people who just don’t have a clue. There are voices of reason out there. I’ve found statements along the lines that Dark Ritual is a strong consideration in decks with three or fewer colors that have close to a proportionate share of black mana symbols, that it’s especially valuable in decks containing cards that confer large advantages when played early, that it becomes harder to justify in decks with a lot of green-based mana ramp, that it’s weaker in slow-rolling control decks, that it doesn’t belong in every deck but is flexible enough to often be worth it, etcetera. I’d agree with all of that. I don’t endorse some hypothetical extreme position that the card should be in every single deck. And yet, I often see it dismissed as only being good in combo decks or only being good in cEDH.
Back in August, I brought up how an EDHrec-based video on Nekusar didn’t include Dark Ritual at any point, even though the card was a shoe-in for the “average” deck. Since then, I know that I’ve argued for the card in other EDH decks, including most recently Rakdos, Lord of Riots. And then just yesterday I saw another one of these videos, this time on Meren of Clan Nel Toth. While the Meren deck lacks the inherent explosiveness that makes Dark Ritual such a good card in the Nekusar deck, it’s still a deck that would benefit from a speed boost. I’ve never built a Meren deck, but I played against one a whole lot. One of the regulars in the West Coast Commander League started out with Meren and his Meren deck was basically his baby. He even deliberately downgraded it so that he could keep playing the same commander against lower power-level decks. But the expensive version of his deck was formidable. Dark Ritual was excellent there, but actually, I was more scared of Culling the Weak, an even more powerful accelerant that doubled as a sacrifice outlet to help his deck go off, frequently threatening third-turn kills. Curious to see that Dark Ritual and Culling the Weak didn’t appear in the “average” Meren deck, I began looking at some lists myself, in a range from true dedicated cEDH lists down to some high-power casual lists. To my surprise, Dark Ritual was not an inclusion in most of those decks. Furthermore, some of the decks that did run Dark Ritual appeared otherwise similar to the ones that didn’t, so the omission didn’t seem to be the result of a strategic shift that made Dark Ritual unsuitable. I didn’t do any testing, but I thought that the Dark Ritual lists were superior to their counterparts that were missing the card, with a couple of possible oddball exceptions like an extreme prison-style build and an all-creatures Umori partner build. And on top of all that, the lists that included Dark Ritual always seemed to also run Culling the Weak alongside it.
In the 90’s, inexperienced players would sometimes dismiss Dark Ritual because of the card disadvantage incurred when a spell it pays for gets hit in a trade. The classic would probably be a situation in which I cast Dark Ritual and use the mana to pay for Hypnotic Specter, then you Lightning Bolt the Hypnotic Specter before I ever get to attack with it, forcing me into a 2-for-1 trade. But in the 90’s, Dark Ritual was so prolific that pretty much all experienced players understood the risk and understood that Dark Ritual was a strong card anyway. Somehow, a bunch of EDH players have all gotten it into their heads that Dark Ritual is a lousy card for the same reason that some newbie in the 90’s would have, only they added a few more steps. But ultimately, all of the objections to Dark Ritual I’ve seen boil down to some version of the Lightning Bolt on Hypnotic Specter problem.
All that would be bad enough, but I think those of us with a better sense of perspective could win out, rhetorically, against the “Dark Ritual isn’t even good in EDH” crowd through logic and demonstration of bonafide results. But there’s one more aspect to all this that ruins it and makes the whole affair infuriating: the caveat that Dark Ritual isn’t good in “normal” EDH decks but only works in “competitive” decks. While I don’t really believe that this kind of bifurcation holds water, I’m left without solid proof that the people espousing this are wrong. There’s no universal standard for when an EDH deck is sufficiently casual. For any given use I can come up with to show that Dark Ritual is a good card, I could just as easily turn around and argue that such usage doesn’t count because it’s not the right style. Taken to its logical extreme, this argument would mean that any analysis of any cards ever is fundamentally useless. But there’s a kernel of truth that makes this a bit more nuanced than that. Competitive EDH games have some distinct play patterns that make some cards better or worse than they’d be at the majority of EDH tables. For instance, Carpet of Flowers is highly popular in cEDH because the likelihood of opponents using islands is elevated in cEDH. And Mystic Remora is much stronger in cEDH than it would be at casual tables because opponents are all but compelled to play multiple non-creature spells early to set up their own win conditions. Dark Ritual probably does gain some traction in cEDH. I just don’t think that the effect is so pronounced. It’s still a great card for casual tables.
My second issue: Jeweled Lotus isn’t like Dark Ritual. It’s a lot more like Black Lotus, a card that has always been banned in the format.
It’s kind of obvious, but downplaying Jeweled Lotus by switching the card in the comparison from Black Lotus to Dark Ritual is a bit strange. I mean, obviously the ostensible rationale would be to compare it to a card that’s actually in the format, so you can point at actual gameplay and say, “Look, not that bad.” But then the catch is inescapable: Black Lotus isn’t in the format. And that’s for a reason.
Black Lotus produces three mana of any one color. Dark Ritual can only produce black mana. Black Lotus requires no mana input to cast it. Dark Ritual needs a single black mana to be cast. Black Lotus nets +3 mana. Dark Ritual nets +2 mana. Black Lotus can be cast and left on the battlefield until it’s needed. Dark Ritual must be cast within the same part of a turn as its mana is used. Black Lotus is an artifact, which can be recurred and easily used in some decks as part of an engine. Dark Ritual is an instant, and generally only recurred incidentally or a single time as part of an effect that effectively gives it the “Flashback” ability. I spent a lot of this article already talking up Dark Ritual. I do think that it’s underplayed in EDH. And it’s my favorite card of all time. But even I have to acknowledge that Dark Ritual is no Black Lotus. Sure, rarity and prestige play into this, but Black Lotus should, in theory, be exactly as rare as Blaze of Glory. The reason for its reputation is at least mostly owed to its extreme potency in speeding a deck up.
Now, I’ve disputed the framing of Jeweled Lotus as basically a lot like Dark Ritual, which supposedly isn’t even good on the grounds that Dark Ritual is actually very good. And I’ve disputed it on the grounds that Jeweled Lotus is a lot more like Black Lotus than it is like Dark Ritual. Although much of the commentary I’ve seen has shown me that such an explanation is necessary, I do have to acknowledge that there’s room for legitimate skepticism as to whether a banned card, or rather a card that is somewhat like a banned card, would be a problem. After all, I’ve criticized the EDH ban list myself as having too many needless inclusions and as being poorly developed. Most of the list dates back to the early days, and EDH in its current form isn’t really comparable to any other format, to the extent that which cards are broken might be dramatically different from what players are used to in other formats. Still, the intuition of the average player is probably that yes, Black Lotus is totally 100% banworthy. But rather than attempting to demonstrate it with a thought experiment or some generalized examples, I can do better. There is a suitable environment in which Black Lotus is available as a card, with usage comparable to the usage it would see in EDH. That environment is known as NBLEDH or “No Banned List EDH.”
I’d already heard of gimmicky EDH pods where groups of players agree to build decks without any cards banned, at least as far back as 2016. But those games were few and far between, and from what details I saw, it seemed like some of the participants just upgraded their existing competitive decks for normal EDH (cEDH decks). But then I stumbled across a Discord server explicitly dedicated to facilitating NBLEDH. The server was created in 2020, although I’d seen the “format” as an idea going back to 2016. It seems that there’s now a small, but dedicated community who actually play this way. It’s not just a novelty, at least not completely. They’ve fleshed out a real metagame and published some sample decklists. So, when (almost) all cards are totally legal and available, how many EDH decks run Black Lotus? The answer appears to be pretty simple: all of them. For my part, that’s no surprise, but just in case there was any doubt, there you have it.
There are some substantially black decks that do happen to be constructed in such a way that Dark Ritual isn’t a good fit. There are no strong decks in any context where Black Lotus, if available, is not a good fit. Of course, the limitation on Jeweled Lotus is pretty severe, and makes it much more constrained than Black Lotus. I contend that this is actually a bad thing. Reserved List and Banned List aside, if we just gave every Magic player a Black Lotus to use in EDH decks, it would be an “autoinclude” along the same lines as Sol Ring, and be about as bad for the format as Sol Ring is. Much like Sol Ring, it would do more for some decks than for others, but generally it would just speed every deck up. Jeweled Lotus isn’t like that, because not every deck can take advantage of it. The decks that can use it get a speed boost from it, while the decks that aren’t suited to rush out a commander get nothing and fall behind relative to their competition.
Jeweled Lotus by itself won’t ruin EDH. But it does skew things and it’s part of a larger trend that has been skewing things. This leads me to my final, and most important issue.
While I find that argument itself depressingly specious, it was really the discussion surrounding it that frustrated me. Before the set was even out, I’d planned on writing this article, explaining my own position on the matter. But I kept hitting snags as I thought out the structure of such an article because really, I had three major issues with the commentary I was seeing surrounding the comparison between Jeweled Lotus and Dark Ritual, and I couldn’t think of a strong way to connect those threads. I schemed up a few approaches, but didn’t like any of them. And really, I still don’t. But I keep running into these issues well over a month later, and I can’t hold back any longer. So I’ll state that up-front: this article is going to be a mess. I’ll be complaining about three separate issues, and some of the people involved in the arguments to which I’ll be referring would really only be guilty of getting one of these points wrong, rather than all three. Perhaps instead of being one cohesive article, this shall be three mini-articles that all just happen to tie into the evaluation of Jeweled Lotus and the card’s implications for EDH.
My first issue: Dark Ritual appears to be underplayed and undervalued in EDH by a lot of people, and I’ve noticed a trend of competent, experienced players dispensing poor deckbuilding advice because they have misread the effect of tempo advantage in multiplayer games.
I suppose that my enthusiasm for Dark Ritual as a Magic card is no secret. It’s my favorite card of all time. I’ve written about it before. I’ve evaluated the card in a “Magic Memories” thread here at the CPA. When contemplating the article you’re reading now, one of my initial ideas was to just throw the stuff about Dark Ritual into that “Magic Memories” thread and try to forget about the other issues. So I’m biased on the topic of this one card, but after careful self-reflection and consideration of what I’ve been observing in online discourse, I really think that I’m right about this.
Let’s be clear about this: underestimating tempo advantage isn’t universal and isn’t limited to Dark Ritual. Observation of decklists from a variety of sources easily shows that a large portion of decklists online do take advantage of Dark Ritual and similar cards. According to data collected by EDHrec, Dark Ritual is the eighth most popular black card in the format. Magic has grown considerably in recent years, EDH is a popular format among newcomers. This is anecdotal, but my experience in the West Coast Commander League left me dumbfounded at how many people I played with who had gotten into Magic within the past couple of years, but who had well-tuned decks with lots of powerful cards. But other than Masters 25, Dark Ritual hadn’t been printed in sets these newer players would have actually seen. So Dark Ritual is doing just fine in EDH, and its numbers might be depressed a bit due to low adoption rates among those newer players.
Despite my passion for the card, I don’t run Dark Ritual in every deck that has a black color identity. Particularly in three-color decks and more polychromatic decks, sometimes there just isn’t enough of a payoff for Dark Ritual to be worth it. I’ve elected not to run Dark Ritual in some two-color decks, although that’s infrequent. In my own EDH decks, Dark Ritual has probably been my fourth most-played black card behind Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, and Toxic Deluge. What makes this so strange and frustrating is that dismissals of Dark Ritual as bad in the format or as a super-niche card seem to be coming from otherwise knowledgeable sources, rather than from people who just don’t have a clue. There are voices of reason out there. I’ve found statements along the lines that Dark Ritual is a strong consideration in decks with three or fewer colors that have close to a proportionate share of black mana symbols, that it’s especially valuable in decks containing cards that confer large advantages when played early, that it becomes harder to justify in decks with a lot of green-based mana ramp, that it’s weaker in slow-rolling control decks, that it doesn’t belong in every deck but is flexible enough to often be worth it, etcetera. I’d agree with all of that. I don’t endorse some hypothetical extreme position that the card should be in every single deck. And yet, I often see it dismissed as only being good in combo decks or only being good in cEDH.
Back in August, I brought up how an EDHrec-based video on Nekusar didn’t include Dark Ritual at any point, even though the card was a shoe-in for the “average” deck. Since then, I know that I’ve argued for the card in other EDH decks, including most recently Rakdos, Lord of Riots. And then just yesterday I saw another one of these videos, this time on Meren of Clan Nel Toth. While the Meren deck lacks the inherent explosiveness that makes Dark Ritual such a good card in the Nekusar deck, it’s still a deck that would benefit from a speed boost. I’ve never built a Meren deck, but I played against one a whole lot. One of the regulars in the West Coast Commander League started out with Meren and his Meren deck was basically his baby. He even deliberately downgraded it so that he could keep playing the same commander against lower power-level decks. But the expensive version of his deck was formidable. Dark Ritual was excellent there, but actually, I was more scared of Culling the Weak, an even more powerful accelerant that doubled as a sacrifice outlet to help his deck go off, frequently threatening third-turn kills. Curious to see that Dark Ritual and Culling the Weak didn’t appear in the “average” Meren deck, I began looking at some lists myself, in a range from true dedicated cEDH lists down to some high-power casual lists. To my surprise, Dark Ritual was not an inclusion in most of those decks. Furthermore, some of the decks that did run Dark Ritual appeared otherwise similar to the ones that didn’t, so the omission didn’t seem to be the result of a strategic shift that made Dark Ritual unsuitable. I didn’t do any testing, but I thought that the Dark Ritual lists were superior to their counterparts that were missing the card, with a couple of possible oddball exceptions like an extreme prison-style build and an all-creatures Umori partner build. And on top of all that, the lists that included Dark Ritual always seemed to also run Culling the Weak alongside it.
In the 90’s, inexperienced players would sometimes dismiss Dark Ritual because of the card disadvantage incurred when a spell it pays for gets hit in a trade. The classic would probably be a situation in which I cast Dark Ritual and use the mana to pay for Hypnotic Specter, then you Lightning Bolt the Hypnotic Specter before I ever get to attack with it, forcing me into a 2-for-1 trade. But in the 90’s, Dark Ritual was so prolific that pretty much all experienced players understood the risk and understood that Dark Ritual was a strong card anyway. Somehow, a bunch of EDH players have all gotten it into their heads that Dark Ritual is a lousy card for the same reason that some newbie in the 90’s would have, only they added a few more steps. But ultimately, all of the objections to Dark Ritual I’ve seen boil down to some version of the Lightning Bolt on Hypnotic Specter problem.
All that would be bad enough, but I think those of us with a better sense of perspective could win out, rhetorically, against the “Dark Ritual isn’t even good in EDH” crowd through logic and demonstration of bonafide results. But there’s one more aspect to all this that ruins it and makes the whole affair infuriating: the caveat that Dark Ritual isn’t good in “normal” EDH decks but only works in “competitive” decks. While I don’t really believe that this kind of bifurcation holds water, I’m left without solid proof that the people espousing this are wrong. There’s no universal standard for when an EDH deck is sufficiently casual. For any given use I can come up with to show that Dark Ritual is a good card, I could just as easily turn around and argue that such usage doesn’t count because it’s not the right style. Taken to its logical extreme, this argument would mean that any analysis of any cards ever is fundamentally useless. But there’s a kernel of truth that makes this a bit more nuanced than that. Competitive EDH games have some distinct play patterns that make some cards better or worse than they’d be at the majority of EDH tables. For instance, Carpet of Flowers is highly popular in cEDH because the likelihood of opponents using islands is elevated in cEDH. And Mystic Remora is much stronger in cEDH than it would be at casual tables because opponents are all but compelled to play multiple non-creature spells early to set up their own win conditions. Dark Ritual probably does gain some traction in cEDH. I just don’t think that the effect is so pronounced. It’s still a great card for casual tables.
My second issue: Jeweled Lotus isn’t like Dark Ritual. It’s a lot more like Black Lotus, a card that has always been banned in the format.
It’s kind of obvious, but downplaying Jeweled Lotus by switching the card in the comparison from Black Lotus to Dark Ritual is a bit strange. I mean, obviously the ostensible rationale would be to compare it to a card that’s actually in the format, so you can point at actual gameplay and say, “Look, not that bad.” But then the catch is inescapable: Black Lotus isn’t in the format. And that’s for a reason.
Black Lotus produces three mana of any one color. Dark Ritual can only produce black mana. Black Lotus requires no mana input to cast it. Dark Ritual needs a single black mana to be cast. Black Lotus nets +3 mana. Dark Ritual nets +2 mana. Black Lotus can be cast and left on the battlefield until it’s needed. Dark Ritual must be cast within the same part of a turn as its mana is used. Black Lotus is an artifact, which can be recurred and easily used in some decks as part of an engine. Dark Ritual is an instant, and generally only recurred incidentally or a single time as part of an effect that effectively gives it the “Flashback” ability. I spent a lot of this article already talking up Dark Ritual. I do think that it’s underplayed in EDH. And it’s my favorite card of all time. But even I have to acknowledge that Dark Ritual is no Black Lotus. Sure, rarity and prestige play into this, but Black Lotus should, in theory, be exactly as rare as Blaze of Glory. The reason for its reputation is at least mostly owed to its extreme potency in speeding a deck up.
Now, I’ve disputed the framing of Jeweled Lotus as basically a lot like Dark Ritual, which supposedly isn’t even good on the grounds that Dark Ritual is actually very good. And I’ve disputed it on the grounds that Jeweled Lotus is a lot more like Black Lotus than it is like Dark Ritual. Although much of the commentary I’ve seen has shown me that such an explanation is necessary, I do have to acknowledge that there’s room for legitimate skepticism as to whether a banned card, or rather a card that is somewhat like a banned card, would be a problem. After all, I’ve criticized the EDH ban list myself as having too many needless inclusions and as being poorly developed. Most of the list dates back to the early days, and EDH in its current form isn’t really comparable to any other format, to the extent that which cards are broken might be dramatically different from what players are used to in other formats. Still, the intuition of the average player is probably that yes, Black Lotus is totally 100% banworthy. But rather than attempting to demonstrate it with a thought experiment or some generalized examples, I can do better. There is a suitable environment in which Black Lotus is available as a card, with usage comparable to the usage it would see in EDH. That environment is known as NBLEDH or “No Banned List EDH.”
I’d already heard of gimmicky EDH pods where groups of players agree to build decks without any cards banned, at least as far back as 2016. But those games were few and far between, and from what details I saw, it seemed like some of the participants just upgraded their existing competitive decks for normal EDH (cEDH decks). But then I stumbled across a Discord server explicitly dedicated to facilitating NBLEDH. The server was created in 2020, although I’d seen the “format” as an idea going back to 2016. It seems that there’s now a small, but dedicated community who actually play this way. It’s not just a novelty, at least not completely. They’ve fleshed out a real metagame and published some sample decklists. So, when (almost) all cards are totally legal and available, how many EDH decks run Black Lotus? The answer appears to be pretty simple: all of them. For my part, that’s no surprise, but just in case there was any doubt, there you have it.
There are some substantially black decks that do happen to be constructed in such a way that Dark Ritual isn’t a good fit. There are no strong decks in any context where Black Lotus, if available, is not a good fit. Of course, the limitation on Jeweled Lotus is pretty severe, and makes it much more constrained than Black Lotus. I contend that this is actually a bad thing. Reserved List and Banned List aside, if we just gave every Magic player a Black Lotus to use in EDH decks, it would be an “autoinclude” along the same lines as Sol Ring, and be about as bad for the format as Sol Ring is. Much like Sol Ring, it would do more for some decks than for others, but generally it would just speed every deck up. Jeweled Lotus isn’t like that, because not every deck can take advantage of it. The decks that can use it get a speed boost from it, while the decks that aren’t suited to rush out a commander get nothing and fall behind relative to their competition.
Jeweled Lotus by itself won’t ruin EDH. But it does skew things and it’s part of a larger trend that has been skewing things. This leads me to my final, and most important issue.
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